NEW DELHI: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi has begun to bring about transparency in the organisation's functioning within days of his anointment as the official number two in the party, taking forward the process initiated by his mother Sonia Gandhi and marking a radical departure from the era of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.

While Sonia Gandhi had sought to dismantle the powerful power centres in Congress when she took over as party president in March 1998, she could not pursue long-pending organisational reforms, a task that her son appears to have started in right earnest. The mother-son duo has together put in place a team with a specific mandate for each member, a far cry from the days of ML Fotedars and RK Dhawans in India's Grand Old Party.

Congress watchers say though there are still Man Fridays in the party, these are just aides and not power centres. Sonia's political secretary Ahmed Patel, for instance, is called whenever there is a crisis, when a senior leader such as Virbhadra Singh threatens to quit Congress and mar the party's electoral chances for example. If there is a revolt by MPs from Telangana on the eve of a crucial vote in Parliament, seasoned politician Kamal Nath is pressed into service.

Rahul signalled change just a week into his new job when he asked all members at the All India Congress Committee meet to speak their mind. What followed was three days of freewheeling interaction: General secretary Digvijaya Singh asked him to shed his indecisiveness and effect organisational change, senior leader BK Hari Prasad talked about money power dominating party functioning to the point that the ordinary worker felt neglected and Mahila Congress chief Anita Verma and secretary Hanumantha Rao impressed upon him the need to start a open house like his grandmother Indira did.

"He questioned the basic problems at ground zero. His main aim is to streamline the system," said senior leader Shakeel Ahmed, who is in charge of party affairs in Bengal and Jharkhand, "I was a minister of state and then a spokesperson in the party and for the last two years I have been the party affairs incharge. If we had any problem we could obviously seek time with Congress president. But never has a meeting been called to understand what problems a state in-charge faces. Rahul ji is doing that. He has held interaction with senior leaders at AICC and then with state chief ministers and Pradesh Congress Committee presidents."

Rahul had briefly outlined his agenda at the brainstorming session in Jaipur, where he spoke about leaders from other political parties parachuting into constituencies and being favoured at the cost of the loyal Congress worker.

Ahmed recalled that at an interaction with party leaders, Gandhi questioned the practice of district Congress committee presidents not being given the authority to remove a non-performing block president under him. "He asked a basic question: How can a district president get work out of a block president when he has no authority over him? He raised the same question about the PCC chiefs not having a say in the removal of a district president. He basically drove home the point that without giving them authority you cannot hold them accountable for anything," Ahmed said.

This spells change in the party which has seen the second line of leaders aligning themselves with the supreme leader from the Nehru-Gandhi family. Indira was advised by PN Haksar, PN Dhar, Siddharth Shankar Ray and Nandini Satpathy while Rajiv had Arun Nehru, MS Aiyar and Arjun Singh to bank upon. "Every leader has some trusted aides around him. They are likeminded people who are close to them. But there are no coteries or power centres now in the party. We can see more such changes with Rahul's style of functioning as well," Ahmed said.

Aiyar, a trusted friend and aide of Rahul's father Rajiv, said the son may have taken a leaf out of his father's book. "Now that he is vice-president of the party, one might expect the approach outlined in Umashankar Dikshit report and flagged in Rajiv's 1985 Congress centenary speech (in which he assailed the "powerbrokers in Congress") to become Congress' motive. I have no reason to believe he will stop at that (elections in NSUI and Youth Congress)," Aiyar said, referring to Gandhi's initiative in holding elections to the post of office-bearers in NSUI and Youth Congress.

Even as some of the senior leaders are likely to feel threatened, the party's younger members are enthused by the stirrings of change. "Rajiv Gandhiji is the one who started the change by bringing in young people at senior levels of organisation. But now we see a completely different outlook with the promise of democratisation of decision-making process," said MoS (home) RPN Singh.

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Aiyar said: "Rajiv was an excellent listener. But he would be very interactive. Sonia is a more reserved person. Rahul is an avid listener. He would much rather listen to the other side. His normal mode is, 'ok, you speak. Now you speak' and maybe right at the end he would speak for just five minutes to put his point across briefly."

Rahul may maintain party's links with civil society developed by his mother through NAC, which helped conceive path-breaking legislations such as the Right to Information Act.